updated 10:10 am EDT, Tue July 28, 2009

Creative Zii Egg

Arriving late to touchscreen players, Creative today unveiled the Zii Egg. The device is in its stock form a competitor to the iPod touch with a 3.5-inch 480x320 multi-touch display that supports music, photo and video playback as well as web browsing. Creative however sees the device as a development platform. The built-in Plaszma operating system is Linux-based and therefore open-source, letting companies or end users add software, change features or even replace the OS; the device is ready to use Google's Android almost out of the box.

It also promises certain technical edges over the iPod through a graphics processor that can not only render 42 million pixels per second but output video at 720p or 1080p through HDMI. The general-purpose design gives it not only Bluetooth and Wi-Fi but both an HD-capable outward camera for taking photos and a front VGA camera for self-portraits or video conferencing. A GPS receiver is built-in for location-based apps even when the Zii Egg is beyond Wi-Fi, and Creative's X-Fi audio processing is standard.

Unusually for most of its players, Creative hasn't specified plans to ship the Zii Egg as its own, pre-packaged device. It should cost as little as $199 US, however, and the company is inviting other firms to treat it as a blank slate which could have no built-in storage whatsoever or as much as 32GB of internal memory plus SDHC cards of similar size.

It's great to see more general-purpose pocket computing devices come out like this, particularly one that's completely open to modification by the user and owner. This is the direction Apple needs to be going if they don't want to be outmaneuvered by competitors. Even if Apple never lets you wipe your iTouch and install Linux on it, at least have a portion of the filesystem the user can modify, and allow them to install any software they want.

iPhone is not ready for Flash yet. Most of the Flash sites today are processor intensive. I have a G3 at home that run 1.25GHz can't render Flash fast enough..... I mean it's very sloooooooooooooow. iPhone's processor is still below 1GHz.